Denver Gunman

I'dbe interested to know if he'd been taking SSRIs - or any other prescription drugs. Maybe not but one would like to know. I think news reporters ought to try to find out that kind of thing when something like this happens. They're not connecting the dots.

I'll add I'm not suggesting that here might be "the cause" -- just that here might be "a factor".

I believe there's a certain amount of evidence connecting SSRIs with violence as well as suicide.

Now random acts of violence against strangers are probably not new. The historian and novelist Paul Doherty says in the introduction to one of his novels that there were cases of bowmen "sniping" at the public in medieval England. And I guess that if that kind of thing were not a (maybe unusual but at any rate not unknown) part of the repertoire of human behaviour it probably wouldn't happen at all.

But I think one has to wonder whether something like a pharmaceutical drug might, on occasion, push an unstable personality in a dangerous direction.

Again, look at Pottenger's cats. After feeding them a sub-optimal diet for several generations, Pottenger noticed behavioural, as well as physical, changes. Some of the females became abnormally aggressive and scratched the handlers; some of the males too docile. Pottenger also noted that some cats displayed what he called "slack or perverted sexual interest".

I don't think we've got anywhere near to the bottom of understanding the effects of poor feeding, cumulatively over generations, yet.

I'm not saying that human being don't have responsibilty for their actions. And I'm not saying that casual violence on TV and other cultural phenomena aren't also relevant. But what I am saying is that generations of sub-optimal food may be impacting people in all sorts of ways.

I think Nora Gedgaudas is right when she says:

We can longer treat food as nutrient-agnostic form of entertainment

She probably says it better than me. (As an aside, there are so many intelligent women in the movement: Nora, Dr. Cate, Julia Ross, Sally Fallon, and many others, that I wish Mark would have a female guest columnist sometimes.)

Then if someone goes to their doctor, the doctor is not working on the basis of getting to the bottom of their problems. The doctor is not asking, "Are you taking appropriate exercise?" and "What stress-reductions techniques are you using?" and "What are you eating?" And if the doctor were asking the last question he or she, in most cases, simply would not know what a good diet does consist in.

Instead, all too often they're working on the basis of reach for the drugs to treat a symptom and get the patient out the door in a matter of minutes. And the drug may not only not help, but may make matters worse.

Forget violence, there's a definite link between SSRIs and suicide. People deserve better.

I was put on Lexapro (SSRI) willy nilly by a doctor and felt incredibly more depressed. I was a teenager when I took them, too.

What worries me is that I was on *tons* of different drugs for my mental health. If my behavior didn't improve on one, my mother would immediately demand another type. The psychiatrist only asked me a few question before pulling out his prescription pad. I never got any actual therapy. This kind of stuff happens to adults and children. It's incredibly stupid.